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Experian: Mobile Payments Over Cards In Five Years

February 10, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

When it comes to credit cards, there are fewer greater authorities in the field than Experian. So when Experian projects a major sea change afoot in the fields of mobile payments and credit cards, it’s worth taking the time to listen. Indeed, this is a major sea change, as Experian projects that mobile payments will actually be in wider use than debit and credit card transactions by 2020.

The report in question, Experian’s Banking Moving Forward study, reveals that customers in the U.K have some very clear notions about just where the status of mobile payments and the like lies.

One in three respondents believe the aforementioned projection of mobile payment supremacy, and it only gets more interesting from there. Nearly half the respondents were ready to put mobile payments to work with a biometric scanning system, and a full fifth were ready to put such systems to work with a voice authentication system.

That’s meaningful in its own right, and there are also clear implications ahead for the flip side of spending as well. Forty percent of respondents expected a decline in credit and debit cards as mobile’s popularity rose, and 70 percent were expecting drops in popularity for even cash.

However, even as people expected a rise in mobile payment popularity to the detriment of pretty much every other form of payment around, there are also concerns. Nearly half of respondents feared identity theft, and 60 percent of respondents noted their devices had no form of malware protection at all, which really contributes quite a bit to the first part of the problem.

Still though, a lot of this can be addressed. Sure, as mobile payments become popular, a lot more people will take to them. With good reason; they’re convenient, they keep excellent records and they go anywhere your smartphone goes, so you can leave your wallet and driver’s license locked in the car when you go shopping without incident, if you even take a wallet along any more and just take the license. But no mobile technology should be used without some breed of protection measure, and there are certainly plenty of same out there.

Only time will tell, of course, if these predictions hold water. There’s certainly enough change projected here to fundamentally shake up a lot of people’s lives by the year 2020. But even then, there will likely be plenty of people who want to do business on a cash-only basis, and plenty of people eager to use a smartphone swipe to make a payment. The numbers may not bear fruit, but it’s not an outlandish prediction to say that, by 2020, mobile payments will be more popular than they are now, and a lot more users will be putting such technology to work.